The Forces That Failed 

AND 

The Burden of the 
Nations 


TWO LECTURES 

With Corroborative Tables compiled from 
The Statesman's Year Book 
1914 


By THOMAS EDWARD GREEN 


The American Peace Society 
Washington, D. C. 

1914 





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The Forces That Failed 


and 

The Burden of the 
Nations 


TWO LECTURES 

With Corroborative Tables compiled from 
The Statesman’s Year Book 
1914 


By THOMAS EDWARD GREEN 


The American Peace Society 
Washington, D. C. 

1914 






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THE FORCES THAT FAILED. 
By Thomas Edward Green. 


In May, 1913, the address on “The Burden of the 
Nations,” which follows this, was delivered at the clos¬ 
ing session of the Fourth National Peace Congress at 
St. Louis. 

The attendance had been large and representative; 
the enthusiasm unmistakable. Speaker after speaker, 
chosen from the most able and representative of the 
peace advocates of the country, had dwelt upon the un¬ 
speakable wickedness of war, and had roused the great 
audiences to the height of optimism over the certainty 
of international vanity and the assurance of arbitration. 

This address was received with prolonged applause. 
The official report of the Congress marked this as “the 
highest pitch of enthusiasm.” 

And yet within fourteen months the European world 
that had promised so much for peace burst into an 
awful cyclone of disaster. Nation after nation mobilized 
their tremendous armies and navies. Battles have been 
fought that in magnitude and hideous slaughter far 
excel any conflicts of the past. Thousands upon thou¬ 
sands of men have been killed. Towns and cities lie in 
smoking ruins. Art, architecture, and historic treasure 
have been ruthlessly destroyed, and Europe today is 
spending $50,000,000 a day in the titanic ruin of war. 

"We had hoped that our dreams were to come true. 
We had believed that the world had seen enough of the 
terrors of battle—had taken leave of the mad, fatuous 
insanity of Militarism. 

But the forces we trusted have failed us. 

The things on which we had depended to save us 
from the stupendous breakdown of civilization have one 
by one been overridden by the ravening monster of 
Militarism. 

It was perhaps fatuous to expect anything else. It 
was logical after all. Europe exploded because Europe 
was loaded. It needed only a spark to bring the terrible 
eruption. 

And yet we had hoped! 

We had believed that financial necessity would prove 
an insurmountable obstacle to war. 



4 


There was not a nation of Europe that was not al¬ 
ready face to face with economic tragedy. 

Of the Triple Alliance, Germany had a debt of three 
and a half billion dollars; Austro-TIungary, three bil¬ 
lion six hundred million; Italy, two billion seven hun¬ 
dred million. 

Of the Triple Entente, Great Britain, three and a half 
billion; France, six billion and a half; Russia, four bil¬ 
lion and a half, and ruined, bankrupt Japan a billion 
and a half against a population of 52,000,000. 

With some of the nations of Europe the limit of pos¬ 
sible obligation had apparently been reached. Italy, 
fresh from her inexcusable war for Tripoli, had a debt 
of two billion seven hundred million dollars against an 
estimated total wealth of twenty billion—that is, a full 
10 per cent of Italy’s total wealth was mortgaged by her 
interest-bearing debt. France, reputed owner of sixty- 
five billions, was paying interest on 10 per cent of her 
entire possession. Germany Vas expending 43.5 of her 
total income on her military establishment. England 
was appropriating 35 per cent of her gross receipts. Of 
the entire wealth of the civilized world $37,000,000,000 
was embodied in national debts—practically all of it 
war debt—and last year (1913) 65 per cent of the reve¬ 
nue of the civilized nations was alienated from all bet¬ 
terment and poured into the ravenous maw of Mili¬ 
tarism. 

Even as it stood two months ago the burden upon 
future generations was crushing—a legacy of poverty 
and woe to the ages yet to come. Taxation even now is 
a tragedy. We imagine we know something about taxes 
here in the United States. We have not yet learned the 
syllables of excise. In Italy the rate ranges from 12 to 
20 per cent. In Japan a willing 30 per cent as a meas¬ 
ure of loyalty and patriotism. But we had hoped that 
all this was an absolute hindrance. 

And yet today the war is costing Europe $50,000,000 
a day. The insanity from an economic viewpoint is 
pitiful; it means turmoil and toil for centuries. It 
means stolid men, wretched women, famished children, 
ruined business, deserted lands—the world gone mad 
for generations to come. 

Nikola Tesla, used to the calculation of the ordinarily 
incalculable, sobers the whole world when he estimates 
that by the end of the two hundredth day the war cost 
will have reached $70,000,000,000! 


5 


The total estimated wealth of the warring nations is 
$300,000,000,000, of which in the end at least twenty- 
five per cent will be the sacrifice that nations must make 
as the price of a few men’s folly! For a hundred years 
three generations must pay and pay, must bear the 
gruelling load of crushing taxation, must be deprived 
of the blessings of civilization and the joy of life because 
the jealous monarchs of today fed their envy on the 
hell broth of war. 

We had hoped that the menacing figure of famine 
would have prevented war. The nations of Europe are 
strangely circumstanced from our American point of 
view. England, France, Germany, Austria, the great 
protagonists in this dreadful conflict, but partially pro¬ 
vide for the actual necessities of their people. Their 
population is so dense, their arable lands so circum¬ 
scribed, that under ordinary circumstances sustenance 
is a problem for careful consideration. With war add¬ 
ing the problem of the feeding of millions of men in 
the field, the withdrawal of those same millions from 
the sphere of labor and productiveness, the question is 
serious indeed. And the problem of the masses of non¬ 
belligerents is greater than all others. A few months, 
even weeks, of blockade and stoppage of supplies and 
starvation is at the door. Already snow and sleet are 
the forerunners of winter, with its added deprivations. 

We had thought that with crops ungathered, fields 
untilled, ports blockaded, supplies exhausted, not alone 
the fighting millions in the field, but the helpless mil¬ 
lions at home—helpless in the clutch of hunger—would 
have cried halt to the madness of jealous Kings. But 
regardless of famine, careless of starvation, the terrible 
conflict marches on. 

We had hoped that the awful sureness of human 
waste would by its horror have frightened the nations 
into peace. 

Used as we are to the great figures and dimensions 
of our modern life, the mind is shocked into startled 
horror at the stupendous spectacle. 

Yonder on a single battle line flung across the hills 
and valleys of sunny France, two million men, armed 
with the deadliest of modern weapons, are locked in the 
dreadful clash of conflict. If every man, woman, and 
child in Chicago were turned into a soldier the total 
would but barely make up the enumeration of this 
belligerent host. 


6 


Indiana/ Iowa, or Wisconsin, fairly populous States, 
•could either but barely match this muster roll of battle 
with its entire population. And on her Eastern Border 
"Germany and Russia are locked in a conflict all but as 
vast. Here are the flower and the strength of six 
nations, the young men of a generation. Behind .them 
.are fields unfilled, factories closed, the vast activities of 
the nations silent and still: 

It is always so when war beats its resounding tocsin 
and calls to the colors the contending hosts. It is 
.always the young men—the strongest, the best—virile, 
red-blooded—meant by virtue of that very red-blooded¬ 
ness to be the husbands, the fathers of a generation that 
is to play its part in universal progress—to lift human¬ 
ity up a step in the evolution of the race; "war takes 
these and leaves the-weak, the anasmic, the dynamically 
unfit to the fatherhood of a generation whose impulse 
is reactionary. That is what war always does. 

When the Balkan fury broke in 1912, in the district 
•of Mustafa Pasha there were by census enumeration 
■3-3,000 men. Today less than 3,000 remain. In Mace¬ 
donia 173,000 was the male population before hostili¬ 
ties. A new enumeration shows but 4-3,000 remaining. 
This was in the w r arfare of mountains and of armies, 
brave but wanting much of munitions that ample means 
might supply. But here is the climax of civilization’s 
possibility, the acme of inventive and productive skill 
aimed at the wholesale destruction of men. Here will 
be the equation of human waste—two million fighting 
men—the exponent to the n\h degree of scientific 
murder. Here will be human wreckage, blood-stained 
trenches on sodden fields heaped full of mangled men, 
blazing crematories trundling in the rear of charging 
columns, incinerating the ghastly trophies of war. 

But the lasting waste is far away from the thunder of 
guns and the flashing of steel. In the shady lanes of 
England, in the village homes of Belgium, in the vine- 
covered cottages of France and in the crowded towns of 
Germany; over the broad fields of Austria, and in the 
peasant hamlets of Russia—everywhere sad-faced 
women will w~eep for those who will come no more— 
everywhere young girls will wait with wistful faces, for 
there will be no strong hands to lead them on the 
flower-strewn paths that reach to wifehood and to 
motherhood. The procreant power of a generation is 
sloughed as rubbish in the void. Man’s folly finds its 
vertex in the waste of war. 


7 


^ It is pitiful satire to say that we had hoped that 
Christian faith and practice, the religion whose profes¬ 
sion has been our proudest and most sacred boast, would 
fend the Christian nations from war. Pius X was the 
only consistent ruler in the world, and he died of a 
broken heart as he prayed for peace. The nations who 
are now in the grip of this mad and savage lust of 
butchery are Christian nations. The Sovereigns seated 
on their jealous thrones are Most Christian Kings. No 
great State papers or publishments but bear the name 
of God. Even the telegrams declaring war are made 
more emphatic by pious invocations. From hostile 
camps, from commanders and armies, blood-stained 
from the slaughter of their fellow-men, rise, the same 
prayers—“God with us” and “Forward with God.” 

But God said, “Thou shalt not kill,” and that law 
unrepealed has come down across the ages. The 
Founder of the Faith is forever the Prince of Peace, 
and His Gospel precludes enmity and hatred and incul¬ 
cates charity and brotherhood among men. We had 
hoped that that Gospel professed and proclaimed would 
have saved the world this fratricidal strife; but the na¬ 
tion that gave birth to Luther and Goethe and Schiller 
is shooting hell into the nation that produced Shakes¬ 
peare and Newton and Darwin. The nation that cradled 
Tolstoy is marching to destroy and burn the univer¬ 
sities of Heidelberg and Leipzig. The nation that has 
led the world in Bible printing, that has sent thousands 
of men and women and millions of money to teach to 
heathen nations the beauty of the Gospel, has called to 
her side a brave and treaty-keeping nation of unbe¬ 
lievers, and is teaching them instead with what fury 
and lust of blood they can cut their fellow-Christians 
down. The war of Europe has in a few brief days un¬ 
done a hundred years of preaching. 

The forces we trusted have failed us. 

Whatever may have been the divergent opinions 
among thinking men as to their theories of life and 
their economic ideals of government, we believed that 
Socialism stood immovably and unconditionally op¬ 
posed to Militarism and against any possibility of war. 

The leaders throughout the world have proclaimed 
their creed and have reiterated their purpose of dead¬ 
locking Parliaments, refusing appropriations, causing 
runs on banks—in every way making war upon war. 
But not more dismal has been the failure of Chris- 


8 


tianity than that of Socialism to save the world this its 
greatest tragedy. 

The forces we trusted have failed us. 

The red lust of war has overswept them all. The 
theory of even an armed peace, that fatuous para¬ 
dox, that sophistical absurdity of which our bureau¬ 
crats have prated, that the only way to avoid war 
was to be invincibly armed has utterly broken down. 
Indeed, it was as it always has been the very 
incentive and stimulus of war. Europe rushed to 
arms because Europe was already at arms. The 
delay of a single month while the nations were pre¬ 
paring for battle would have led to calmer consideration 
and to probable compromise. But with vast forces 
armed and equipped, ready on the moment for march¬ 
ing and fighting, war came as resistlessly as a red spark 
would fire a powder blast. Armed peace has been its 
own disproval. The world has been convinced more 
surely than by a thousand arguments that safeguarding 
peace by force of arms is only to make more possible 
and more terrible the certainty of war. 

And so the great war is here. That which men have 
been fearing for nearly half a century has come to pass. 
Despite all of our theories, utterly contravening our 
logic, making mock of all our arguments, it came so 
easily, so automatically as to shock the reason of the 
world. 

Why did it come ? What sudden rush of causes 
brought it about? But a few months ago we were con¬ 
gratulating ourselves upon the comradeship, the friend¬ 
liness between nations. Great mutual activities had 
been brought into being. The social conscience every¬ 
where was rising to a supreme sense of obligation. 
Never in modern history had so many of our great 
problems seemed at the very point of solution. Now in 
a moment almost all is undone. All activities for social 
welfare have been put back for years. The whole social 
fabric has been shattered with the awful clamor of the 
mighty guns of war. 

What were the causes that produced this stupendous 
reversal? What power was sufficiently strong to over¬ 
throw the accomplishment of half a century? 

Fundamentally three men have upset the world’s 
peace. Three men are demanding the sacrifice of thou¬ 
sands of lives to bolster up their thrones. The decrepit 
Emperor, the superstitious Czar, the haughty and im- 


9 


perious Kaiser—these and the men who wait upon their 
nod have deluged Europe with blood. Hapsburg, Ro¬ 
manoff, and Hohenzollern—accidents of rank, incarna¬ 
tions of an insolent, arbitrary power, soon to be swept 
out of existence by the triumphant evolution of a world¬ 
wide Democracy—these are they who by a long-lived 
system of compulsion that holds in subjection millions 
of men have been able to inflame a delusive patriotism 
and to demand the lives of thousands worthy of a better 
cause. The men who are fighting and dying have been 
born and bred into a system that centers around what 
men call a King. Into their philosophy of life there 
has come little of the ideals of a government whose ex¬ 
istence is justified only as it serves the public good. 
They serve the throne because they still are the crea¬ 
tures of the divinity that hedges around a throne. 

But eliminate the personal ambition of self-seeking 
rulers—the deliberate imperious purpose of European 
royalty to perpetuate and intensify its power, to insure 
to generations of blood royal the pomp and emoluments 
of rule—what is there in this present struggle that de¬ 
serves the sacred sacrifice of human life for its defense ? 
What were the causes that hurled Europe into this 
hideous vortex of destruction—this raging tempest of 
slaughter ? Skilled experts in international strategy 
have much to tell of the intricacy of plans for far- 
reaching combinations—of proposed roads to the Far 
East, of Pan-Germanism, of Pan-Islamism. These are 
the hidden things of Cabinets, the secret plans of Chan¬ 
celleries. 

But in the syllables of ordinary understanding these 
seem to be the factors in the fight: 

Racial hatred first; the age-long enmity between the 
Teuton and the Slav; a purpose of extermination as 
base as the instinct of brutes; a vendetta as implacable 
as the blood-vow of the savage of the wilderness. 

Then the insatiable, rapacious lust of possession; 
Russians dogged, tenacious, ever undeviating purpose of 
crowding Turkey out of Europe, and acquiring an un¬ 
frozen outlet to the oceans of the world. 

Then the sores that do not heal. France, ever mind¬ 
ful of her lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine and of 
the billion-dollar penalty of her last disastrous defeat at 
Sedan. 

And then the jealousy of accomplishment. Ger¬ 
many’s stupendous growth; her magnificent triumphs. 


10 


of brain and brawn; her mighty hand in the civilization 
of the world. And England’s possible wane; her per¬ 
petual loss by emigration to America and her own 
mighty colonies over sea. Germany’s challenge to Eng¬ 
land’s ancient prestige; the race for the proud position 
of premier of Europe, and, despite the hard to be be¬ 
lieved fact of America’s unassailable supremacy, the 
temporary dynamic leadership of the world. 

These were the causes that, in their sudden and ac¬ 
cumulative potency, baffled diplomacy, laughed at 
treaties, upset the equilibrium of Europe, and lighted 
the flames of war. 

But paramount to all of these was the single, com¬ 
pelling, all-predominant fact of preparation. All of 
these facts have been in evidence for years. Time and 
again they have become inflamed spots on the inter¬ 
national body. Time and again they have created ten¬ 
sion and threatened to break the peace. But the na¬ 
tions were not ready. For the last ten years they have 
been bending every energy to the creation of army and 
navy power, fatuously persuading themselves that they 
were guarding and insuring peace. Behind this glit¬ 
tering and insane pretense they defended militarism, 
made of ruinous taxation a patriotic sacrifice, exhausted 
their resources, pauperized their people. 

With stupendous armaments, top-heavy in their vast¬ 
ness, it needed but a spark to ignite a universal con¬ 
flagration. A shot fired bv a fanatically loyal Servian—- 
a crime, but a crime only because it was fired without a 
declaration of war—and nation after nation took its 
place in the blazing battle line. 

The reasons alleged by each of the contending na¬ 
tions for their individual declarations are varied, each 
claiming especial wrongs and standing for especial 
rights. 

Austria first declared war on Servia because of the 
murder of her Crown Prince by a member of a Servian 
society devoted to revenge upon the Teuton power for 
the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This soci¬ 
ety was known as Harodna Odbrana, and was presumed 
to exist with at least the knowledge of the royal Ser¬ 
vian government. Ho sooner were the guns of Austro- 
Hungary turned against Belgrade than Bussia, in sym¬ 
pathy with her kindred Slavs, ordered the mobilization 
of her army. 

With the entry of Bussia into the fray, Germany at 


11 


once issued her ultimatum, and, despite the interchange 
of apparently pacific telegrams between the royal 
cousins, declared a state of war with Russia. 

France, the acknowledged ally of Russia, with no 
immediate interest in the matter save that she was un¬ 
compromisingly opposed to Germany, was interrogated 
as to her position in case of war between Russia and 
Germany, and replied that “she would do that which 
might be required of her by her interests.” This was, 
of course, tantamount to a defiance, and brought the 
natural response-; instead of resisting Russia, Germany 
at once mobilized against France. To reach the French 
frontier Germany must march across Belgium, violating 
the Belgian neutrality to which she had been herself a 
signatory power. 

Belgium at once appealed to England, and in answer 
to Belgium, and in defense of her own coasts, England 
issued her ultimatum to Germany. By the midnight 
of August 4 the lines were all drawn—the Triple En¬ 
tente was arrayed against the Triple Alliance, and the 
world’s conflict was begun. Italy only—already 
crushed by her war for Tripoli—failed to come to her 
treaty obligation, and declared neutrality. Away in 
the Orient, Japan, bound by her understanding with 
England, full of resentment against Germany for her 
part in the interference at the close of her war with 
China, mobilized her army and navy, and struck at the 
German base at Kiao-Chau. Away in central Africa, 
English and German gunboats met in battle on the 
surface of Victoria Nyanza. Only the Americas were 
immune in the desperate conflict. The nightmare of 
the world had come true; the clash of the titans was 
an accomplished fact. 

What the result of the world’s greatest war will be no 
one is wise enough to foresee. 

At the end of its ninth week, when these words are 
written, the first mad dash is over. Germany has dev¬ 
astated Belgium, absorbed Luxemburg, swept like a 
tempest into France, and has been halted and turned 
back at the very gates of Paris. With such fighting 
as the world has never known, the far-flung line of bat¬ 
tle holds in dav after day of fearful carnage. With 
Austria at bay before the oncoming Russian host, it is 
Germany alone against the allied arms of England, 
Belgium, and France, with Russia’s millions pouring 
across her eastern frontier. 


12 


In all of history there has never been such a spec¬ 
tacle of horror. No artist’s imagination has ever 
painted such an inferno of slaughter. 

Out yonder is the horrid wreck and wrack of battle. 
The awfulness is indescribable. We have not yet in¬ 
vented adjectives with which to tell of the terror of 
civilized warfare. It is well for the war lords that they 
have forbidden journalists the battle line, the sight of 
their freshly fought fields. The world would rise gasp¬ 
ing, dizzy, shocked into madness by the horror of 
modern battle. 

In mass and column come thousands of men, strong, 
manly, unafraid. A burst of fire infernal, a hail of 
hurtling lead, the flash of steel, the ripping lunge of 
bayonet, mad, savage, hellish murder, the sound of tear¬ 
ing flesh, of crunching hone, the spurting of red blood, 
torn entrails, spattered brains upon the blood-stained 
ground, and they who live sweep on with blazing eyes, 
with maddened souls, with hands steeped red in human 
gore, and leave behind them that which had been men, 
torn, bleeding, writhing in awful - agony—-the butchered 
cost of the mad ambitions of the thing that men call a 
king. 

They who cherish the world’s delusion that war is 
the climax of glorious patriotism, the opportunity for 
deeds of splendid valor, have but to look and listen to 
find their ideal overthrown. Battle today is butchery, 
a thing of machine guns, of bursting shells, of range 
and distance. Napoleon said, “A boy can stop a Rus¬ 
sian bullet as well as a general.” Bullet stoppers! 

And above the field, poisoned with powder smoke and 
reeking with hot blood, black-winged vultures circle 
hungrily—and crematories belch out the hideous fumes 
of burning flesh. Not glory, not splendor—only hide¬ 
ous butchery, and ghastly, gory death. 

It is folly to talk now of peace. The awful tragedy 
must work itself out in fire and blood. 

When the day shall come—and heaven grant its 
speedy dawning—when slaughter and famine, when 
disease and death shall have wrought their ghastly 
work, let us hope and pray that this great nation of ours 
shall have so held itself in neutral friendliness to all 
mankind that it may be ours to offer and apply the 
mediation that shall lead to peace. 

Prouder than with the glory of a thousand battles are 
we to see our great Republic stand in superb and neutral 


13 


might, the friend of all humanity, the arbiter of right¬ 
eousness, guardian of the sacred Eegis of peace. Her 
flag, resplendent in its beauty, the symbol of Justice, 
the refuge of safety. It was nothing less than inspired 
wisdom that led George Washington to weight with 
solemn import his warning to this infant nation to for¬ 
ever avoid entangling alliances with foreign powers, 
Nor have we less cause for thankfulness, in the careful 
poise and wise control with which our present Executive 
is guiding us amid the parlous problems of present cir¬ 
cumstance. We have still our dangers. The contagion 
of war lust in those who by a perverted philosophy we 
have educated and trained in the gentle art of killing— 
a thousand fold more dangerous the mad delusion that 
we must arm to keep the peace—the insane theory, 
despite the demonstration of the present war, that we 
must build a great navy, and increase our army for fear 
we may be attacked. More dangerous still the insidious 
peril of individual and corporate greed. The unscru¬ 
pulous scheming of private capital invested in the mak¬ 
ing of armor plate—the manufacture of arms and 
ammunition—the greed that has not hesitated to employ 
hired emissaries to fan dormant enmities, to kindle ani¬ 
mosities, to create a market by manufacturing war. 
God save us from the perfidious treachery of avarice, 
and keep us still "America, the peacemaker of the 
world.” 

But let us remember that whatever may be the re¬ 
sults of victory or defeat with respect to boundary lines 
or vast indemnities, peace—real peace, that will be 
lasting and worldwide in its inestimable blessing—can 
come in but one way, and that must be the elimination 
of the whole theorv of militarism as an adjunct of civil¬ 
ization—the disarmament, beyond the absolute neces¬ 
sity of police control, of the nations of the world. 

Out of this stupendous conflict its great protagonists 
will come exhausted, battered, and undone. Of each 
contending nation war will take a hideous toll. Hun¬ 
dreds of thousands of men—young men largely, red- 
blooded, fertile-loined—meant by virtue of their virile 
power to be the builders of a nation’s strength, will lie 
in the awful trenches of blood-drenched battle-fields. 
At home there will be ruined homes, bereaved women, 
orphaned children—an incalculable burden of poverty 
and want. Army corps that marched with fluttering 
flags and the resounding throb of beating drums will 


14 


come back with broken lines and shattered columns—a 
mere remnant of the mighty host, wounded and 
maimed—a charge upon a nation’s heart. And there 
will be ruined cities, fair towns in dust and ashes, wicU - 
flung acres deserted and unplowed, idle factories, a na¬ 
tion’s life stagnant and palsied by the cankering touch 
of war. 

And on the shoulders of generations yet unborn there 
will be an awful load of debt—insolvency for years, 
eating at the heart of progress with the gnawing teeth 
of usance—crushing taxation, penniless discontent. 

The things that should be done will clamor with a 
thousand stridulous tongues and mingle in the disso¬ 
nance of distress. 

The weary world will cry for peace, and from this 
direful combat peace will come. 

Against* a crimson sky, lit up with burning cities and 
smoking battle pyres, there shines a star of hope for the 
generations that are to come. 


November, 1914. 


THE BURDEN OF THE NATIONS.* 
By Thomas Edward Green. 


If money is the measure of economic value, civiliza¬ 
tion is standing today face to face with its most stupen¬ 
dous problem. Sixty-five per cent of the entire income 
of the civilized world was lavished during the last year 
upon a single object, an object that by common consent 
stands very low in the scale of moral appraisement. 

Whatever may have been the glory of the lost arts or 
the splendor of the famed Atlantis, we love to persuade 
ourselves these days that our generation is at least writ¬ 
ing some new chapters in the history of enlightenment. 
Our age is instinct with attainment. It devises decora¬ 
tions for those who bend the cosmic forces of the uni¬ 
verse anew to the will of man. 

It enriches fertile furrows; changes fruit and flowers- 
to richer beauty and fragrance, and reaps redoubled 
harvests with the pruning-hooks of skilled capacity. 

It rids the world of slavery; cleanses the putrid pools 
of pestilence; rescues humanity from the age-long bond¬ 
age of pain, disease, and death. 

It has laid the ghosts of fear and bigotry; eliminated 
error; boldly challenged ancient sophistry; emancipated 
thought; flung wide the portals of unfettered research. 
All this and more is the motif of the twentieth century. 
Added to a wise philosophy, joined with fraternal co¬ 
operation, it ought to be the dynamic measure of an 
Age of Gold. To its furtherance there should be given 
the best and highest constructive and conservative forces 
of the world. But iconoclasm has possessed the better 
judgment of the world. A vampire philosophy is suck¬ 
ing the life blood of lofty purpose. 

Civilization today lauds and decorates her sages; but 
an age unequaled among the centuries in incalculable 
treasure still sends its scholars to search in stinted 
squalor; chains investigation with insufficiency; prog¬ 
ress pines in poverty; earth’s largest, loftiest longings 
languish in impotent indigence, while civilization pours 
uncounted millions at the shrine of ravening savagery, 
and wastes the substance of its people in the murderous 
enginery of war. 

*An address originally delivered at the Fourth National 
Peace Congress at Saint Louis. May 3, 1913; revised and 
enlarged. 




16 


During 1912 the nations spent two billion two hun¬ 
dred and fifty millions of dollars ($2,250,000,000) in 
the creation of military and naval armament. 

Since history began to be written, it is estimated that 
fifteen billion men have died as a result of battle. Such 
figures are beyond the possibility of our normal concep¬ 
tion. Our Saviour was born nineteen centuries ago. 
From the moment that the new-born Child lay in the 
manger cradle in Bethlehem until now, there have been 
barely one billion minutes. Fifteen billion men means 
nil the human beings that have lived in the world for six 
hundred years, counting three generations to a century. 
That many men have died in war. 

During the nineteenth century alone 14,000,000 men 
died as a result of battle, and it cost the world forty-two 
thousand million dollars for their taking off. And as 
the result of all that stupendous price of life and treas¬ 
ure there stands but little great achievement recorded 
lor the common good. 

On the ledger pages of history there are few great ac¬ 
complishments to balance the awful account. It meant 
for the most part simply a change of masters or a con¬ 
test over the boundaries of adjacent States—the gratifi¬ 
cation of envy, jealousy, and hatred; the bloody enthu¬ 
siasm of mere physical victory! Of course, the great 
Civil War in America effected the emancipation of 
millions of negro slaves ; but with the money that that 
war cost us, the actual outlay, to say nothing of the 
price of a myriad of lives or of the awful heritage that 
after fifty years still remains to vex and trouble us, we 
might have bought, paid for, educated, and endowed 
every slave forty times over. 

And yet, with the awful experience of history to make 
us wise, there is a type of so-called statesmanship that 
still insists that war is tenable between civilized na¬ 
tions. Hot war, mind you, as an absolutely frank, out¬ 
spoken purpose of destruction. There are few, save 
those who by a perverted policy we have educated and 
trained in the gentle art of killing, who would justify 
the world’s ancient savagery and find in its bloody 
cruelty an ideal of courage. To justify itself the age 
has invented a new delusion. War, in its 'grim reality, 
is the sole survivor of mediaeval barbarism. Everything 
else has been banished. We have eliminated pestilence; 
we have removed slavery; we have prevented famine. We 
have driven superstition and ignorance before the ad- 


17 


vancing light of civilization and culture. AYar alone of 
all remains to flaunt its horrid crest in the face of the 
twentieth century. An age whose loudly lauded ideals 
are the protection, the development, the evolution of 
human life cannot justify war; for war deliberately 
plans the ruthless, inhuman destruction of myriads of 
living men. It makes possible the agony and the name¬ 
less suffering incident to torn and mangled bodies. It 
inflicts upon the innocent and defenseless the hideous 
torment of bereavement, the lasting, gnawing grief of 
broken-hearted solitude, and the long sunless future 
of dreary, unalleviated poverty and want. It takes 
from a generation its strongest and most virile men, 
and leaves the decadent, anaemic, and unfit to the father¬ 
hood of generations to come. It destroys homes, it de¬ 
spoils widows, it bereaves orphans. It exalts murder 
into virtue. It halos cruelty with the excellency of 
courage. It drags down human brotherhood and fills 
the world with the foul dissonance of fiends let loose 
from hell. All this, and indescribably, unspeakably 
more, is war; and so no one justifies war. 

There is not a sovereign in the world today that would 
advocate war. There is not a Parliament or Congress in 
the world today that would countenance war. There is 
not a prime minister in the world today that would sug¬ 
gest war. There is not a journal or a review in the 
whole world today but deprecates war. There is not a 
nation in the world today but trembles at the mention of' 
war. And yet never since history began to be written 
has the world wasted so much of the people’s substance, 
never have such enormous expenditures been lavished, 
as the great nations of the earth are flinging into the 
mad, fatuous race of the militarism of today. 

On the one side, they tell us war is impossible—that 
the whole thing is a mad delusion. The great political 
economist, Jean de Bloch, in that eminent work that has 
merited the admiration of the civilized world, has proven 
that the great war—the war that has been haunting the 
imagination of men for a hundred years—has auto¬ 
matically eliminated itself from the realm of possibility; 
that we have made on the one hand so resistless our 
agencies of destruction, and on the other so stunendous 
our powers of resistance, that the result is a dvnamic 
stalemate. But for the most part men have realized 
that all these lavish resources are not for a mere phan¬ 
tasm of purpose. AYar is still as possible as ever. But 


18 


men have hidden its awful meaning behind a skilled 
mask of deception. 

We are not fighting war in this Peace Congress, for 
nobody wants war. We are fighting a delusion. We 
have invented a new economy that protests with fulsome 
platitudes its humanitarian purposes. It loathes war, 
it loves peace, and the only way in which we can insure 
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is to be ready 
at any cost, however enormous, to compel peace, even by 
barbaric force—for each individual nation to be so 
strongly, so invincibly armed as to make all other na¬ 
tions peaceful and affectionate, even if one has to shoot 
them into obedient tranquillity. 

The kindest excuse that we can make for such a phi¬ 
losophy is to say that militarism is a disease—that it is 
an economic pestilence, life sapping, reason destroying, 
irrational. Its entire philosophy is a delusion. There 
is no logic by which it can be justified. Common sense 
as well as common conscience have eliminated such ar¬ 
guments from the world of individuals. The field of 
honor is marked with the bar sinister—and in every 
civilized nation the “code duello” is under the ban of 
the criminal law. Only the logic of barbarism can 
justify it between nations. But you give a man a gun 
and his finger tingles with the touch of the treacherous 
trigger. There is a strange morbid psychology about 
it. Before you know it—before he knows it—he will 
begin to shoot; not because he has anything to 
shoot about—not because he has anything to shoot at; 
merely because he has something to shoot with. A gun 
is a dangerous thing, “without lock, stock, or barrel.” 

Let nations maintain vast armaments, call them readi¬ 
ness for war or guarantees of peace as you like, and the 
world is simply an armed camp where a spark may 
kindle a conflagration. Where once the nations matched 
force against force, intent upon conquest, today the na¬ 
tions match force against force, deceived by a mere trick 
of words. Armies were once the potent agents by which 
ambitious nations insured victory. Today they are the 
equally resistless dynamics by which the nations prevent 
defeat. Save only in sentimental phrases, there has been 
no change, except that with advanced acquirements the 
requirements are greater than ever before. 

The rivalry is the same—mad, fatuous, and insane. 
The expenditure is beyond all comprehension, and not 
war, but an insane militarism, is throttling the world. It 


19 


is a disease—reason destroying, insensate, incoherent— 
a pestilence self-nourished. It respects neither present 
good nor future evil, and today the world's greatest 
problem is, Can civilization save itself? Has it an anti¬ 
septic for this cancerous distemper? Is there any end 
possible save chaos? 

To safeguard peace the nations prepare for war. Stu¬ 
pendous armies, magnificent navies, are hailed as the 
supreme safeguards of civilization. Statecraft juggles 
with words; clothes itself with pretense; presents to the 
historic judgment of a century to come the pitiful spec¬ 
tacle of a deluded age that increases its armaments at 
the expense of two billion dollars a year for the purpose 
of making those armaments useless—an age when na¬ 
tions are willing to confess that they are bankrupting 
themselves to keep from fighting. 

A few months ago the German Emperor celebrated 
the twenty-fifth anniversary of his coronation. In the 
midst of the ceremonies incident to that interesting 
event he made a speech, in which he said, if there was 
one thing for which, above all others, he thanked 
Almighty God, it was that during all those twenty-five 
years he had been able to maintain inviolate the peace of 
Europe. And yet, at the moment that Emperor William 
spoke these high-sounding and commendable words, he 
had an army of 650,000 of the most scientifically trained 
soldiers in the world, with a round million more in the 
first and second reserve—the most stupendous fighting 
machine the world has ever known, ready at his beck and 
nod to take the field against any foe on a day's notice— 
an army for which Germany is spending this year forty- 
five per cent of her income—an army costing the Ger¬ 
man people over $250,000,000 for this single twelve 
month. 

The statesmen of the world stand aghast. They dare 
not drop behind in the mad race of equipment. They 
are tormented by the old-time philosophy of the survival 
of the strongest. On either side lies peril. They ap¬ 
preciate the value of the things that should be done, but 
cannot be done for lack of public ways and means. 

They recognize the calamity of an enormous ruinous 
taxation, crushing the people into helpless penury, gen¬ 
dering insensate discontent, threatening the very foun¬ 
dations of law and order. 

They know that the masses of the people, the bone 
and sinew of the nation's welfare, are not afraid of foes 
abroad. They are afraid of want and penury, the bur- 


20 


den of the struggle of life at home, every year becoming 
more burdensome and more exhausting. They know 
that on the same common people they must depend alike 
for money with which to equip and the men with which 
to fight. And they know that they are rapidly approach¬ 
ing the point where both are going to be denied. 

It is always the masses of men who furnish the means 
that support the government and the lives that defend 
it. That has always been true—and is true now—every¬ 
where. The economic masters of men have always man¬ 
aged to evade responsibility along both lines. Let us not 
imagine that we have an American monopoly of that 
familiar bit of hocus-pocus by which the predatory 
wealth and protected interests have been able to en¬ 
trench themselves behind the organic structure that we 
call government, and there with .nimble fingers to ma¬ 
nipulate the strings that control legislation and its ap¬ 
plication so as to be able to complacently shrug from 
their shoulders the burden of obligation that rightly be¬ 
longs to them over unto the bent and straining backs of 
the masses of common men, who have always borne the 
burden and the heat of the day. Taxation is a tragedy 
the world around, and tax dodging ranks with polo as 
the recreation of the few. 

And it is the masses of men who do the fighting. The 
masters of men seldom peril their precious lives. Let us 
hang our heads with shame for humanity as we confess 
that time and again these masters of men have not hesi¬ 
tated to involve nations in the clash of bloody war, that 
out of it there might come aggrandizement for their sel¬ 
fish interests or increase of their already swollen for¬ 
tunes. 

If we could take the wars of the past century and get 
behind the pomp and ceremony of waving plumes and 
blaring bands and find the real sources from which they 
sprang, it would be surprising how little there would be 
found that by the farthest flight of imagination might 
be attributed to that highest impulse of the soul that we 
call patriotism. 

Selfishness in all its sordid ugliness does not hesitate 
at means to accomplish its ends. But the world around, 
today the masses of men are beginning to know their 
worth. The masses of men are beginning to feel their 
power. Th e masses of men are'beginning to realize that 
through the centuries they have been the complacent 
cat’s-paws that have raked the chestnuts of advantage 


21 


even out of the red flames of war for some one’s selfish 
advantage. And the time is rapidly coming when the 
masses of men are going to stand before their erstwhile 
masters, and are going to say, “Go on, gentlemen, go on. 
Declare war if you want to; but also understand if you 
declare war now, you can do the fighting yourselves. 
We have nothing to fight about! We are content as we- 
are! We have our homes and our wives and our chil¬ 
dren. Go away, and let us alone! We have nothing to* 
fight about. Do your fighting yourselves.” 

There are several things that are entering as essential 
dynamics into the solution of some of our present prob¬ 
lems. 

First and most far-reaching is the emancipation and . 
the enfranchisement of women. The day has dawned 
when men will no longer dare to deny to woman what is= 
hers by the divinely bestowed birthright of her woman¬ 
hood—the right of having a voice in determining what 
kind of a world it is to be in which the sons and daugh¬ 
ters shall live whom she perils her life to bring into the- 
world. Women don’t go down into the dark valley and 
the shadow of death, and through long hours of an¬ 
guish stand face to face with grizzly terror, to give birth 
to sons whose end it shall be to dress themselves in some 
one’s tinsel uniform and make targets of their bodies 
for the bullets of selfish ambition. When woman comes- 
into her own, wars, believe me, will be few and mighty 
far between. 

And the world, too, is breaking away from that phi¬ 
losophy of lies, made sacrosanct by centuries of usance— 
a philosophy behind which has stood what men have 
falsely called religion—that has taught that God meant 
the world to be what it has been—that some men should 
be high and other men should be low; some men should 
be rich and other men poor; that some men should be 
masters, and the rest of us just men. The world is 
breaking with that sort of ecclesiastical tommy-rot. 
God never did anything of the kind. And as men come 
to grasp and understand the divine communism of the- 
carpenter’s Son of Nazareth, as men begin to compre¬ 
hend the Universal Fatherhood of God, there will come 
the deep, wide social gospel of human brotherhood, and 
the world battalions will become invincible guardians of 
peace—the guarantors of every man’s right to life , and 
to an even chance to live. 

But last year the so-called civilized nations spent $2,- 
250,000,000 in preparation for war. This year it will' 


22 


probably be $3,000,000,000. That is more than 170 per 
cent increase in the past thirty years, and the increase 
.has been largely during the last decade. 

Let the same increase go on—and with growing 
rivalry it will be far larger during the next decade—and 
it will demand the present total income of civilization— 
and that means economic bankruptcy—the destruction 
of the very foundation upon which organized society 
Tests. So the nations rage. There seems no possible 
stopping place. Behind them is a crazed, resistless force; 
-before them yawns the Stygian abyss of destruction. 

Let it be understood that in the discussion of such a 
question as this a radical distinction must be observed 
^between the dominant nations of Europe and the United 
States of America. With them conditions are by force 
■of circumstance, and the necessity that grips them is the 
result of resistless environment. They are the legatees 
of centuries of struggle, the creatures of hereditary 
rivalry, jealousy, and inborn antipathy. 

Out of a unique environment of absolute self-suffi¬ 
ciency we are still, thank God, the architects of our own 
fortunes. Our relations, our attitude to the great prob¬ 
lems of international economy are still not matters of 
necessity, but of deliberate choice. What the United 
States is today, what she will be tomorrow, is still in the 
Providence of God what she chooses to be. 

Alone among the nations we are in a peculiar sense a 
self-determining people. England, for example, raises 
only a small per cent of what her people eat. Much of 
her food supply she purchases outside her boundary 
lines, and she must bring it across oceans and over the 
channel, protected against foreign attack and confisca¬ 
tion. In Germany the per cent of food supply and raw 
material for her manufactures produced at home is 
smaller still. In both . England and Germany imports 
are largely in excess of exports—and both England and 
Germany make vast demands upon the surplus produc¬ 
tion of the United States. There is the unique protec¬ 
tion of the American flag. There is the unparalleled 
defense of this Bepublic that we love. Not its eminent 
■domain, so vast that even winged imagination cannot 
compass its tremendous expanse.^ Not its resources, in¬ 
calculable, and scarcely yet touched in. their develop¬ 
ment, but the fact that America has become absolutely 
necessary to the rest of the world. 

There isn’t an American farmer today plowing his 
field, planting his seed, reaping in due time the golden 


23 


harvest that God gives us as an earnest to honest toil, 
who isn’t ten times the defense to the flag of his country 
as is the most brass-buttoned, gilt-bedecked admiral 
that ever trod the quarter-deck of a battleship. Why? 
For the simplest reason in the world. America has be¬ 
come the bread basket of civilization. Keep your hand 
on the cover of the world’s bread basket, and your flag 
is as safe as if it were surrounded by glittering bayonets 
or guarded by great batteries of embrasured guns. No 
nation will ever attack, or allow to be attacked, another 
nation upon which she depends for the food that keeps 
her people alive. 

In Copenhagen I sat at lunch with a brilliant news¬ 
paper man, talking with him of such things as these. I 
said to him, “Don’t you feel a bit nervous sometimes, 
perched here on your little promontory, with Germany 
on one side and England on the other? Aren’t you 
afraid that some day the big millstones may begin to go 
around, and that Denmark may be the grist for some 
one’s grinding?” He laughed as he answered, “Have 
you forgotten that Denmark has the strongest navy in 
the world?” I wanted to tell him that I was “from 
Missouri,” but I didn’t know how to put it in French 
so he would understand the subtle significance of Amer¬ 
ican slang. Denmark is one of those happy nations so 
nearly neutralized as to need very little army or navy. 
She has a few regiments and squadrons for guard duty 
and ceremonies. She has a few gunboats, useful for 
harbor patrol and to fire salutes for visiting sovereigns. 
But Denmark is practically, and yet safely, unarmed. 
I asked my friend to explain, and in perfect seriousness 
he repeated: “Denmark has the strongest navy in the 
world. Every day, practically from January to De¬ 
cember, one, and often two, ships sail from Copenhagen 
for London loaded with butter and cheese and cream! 
That is the strongest navy in the world.” And he was 
right. Nor was it a pun on Gouda cheese. Every gun 
of England would roar, every soldier of England would 
march to the defense of little Denmark did any one 
dare to lay a finger on her, for Denmark has become the 
creamery of England’s breakfast table. Nor is there a 
nation in the world today but needs for its comfort, if 
not for its necessity, what we only can supply. 

Ours, too, is the only nation around whose border you 
might build a wall so high and so strong that none from 
without might enter, that none from within might with¬ 
draw. Within it you may enclose this United States, 


24 


with its hundred million people, and leave us to our 
fate—ten, twenty, thirty years—and at the end of three 
decades a visitor from Mars might drop down here, 
there, yonder—anywhere—and he would merely find 
the American people as much stronger, richer, happier, 
and contented as the years had been few or many in 
their flight. 

It is time, then, high time, for the thinking people of 
the United States to take stock of the great world prob¬ 
lems as they exist today, and to determine whether we 
are to be mere imitators, tagging at the heels of the 
moth-eaten, suicidal policies of the nations of Europe, 
entangled already in a hopeless muddle, whose only solu¬ 
tion is havoc, or whether we are to be brave enough to 
rise to our opportunity and at least point the way to the 
threshold of a new era, whose marks of attainment are 
to be an immediate end to this ruinous expenditure for 
military armament, the absolute elimination of war be¬ 
tween civilized nations, and the establishment of courts 
of arbitration for the settlement of all international 
disputes. 

Aside from the humanitarian arguments everywhere 
admitted, even if everywhere violated, there stands the 
tremendous logic of facts. Militarism is the burden of 
the nations. It is exhausting their substance, impover¬ 
ishing their people, retarding their progress as no war 
ever did or ever could do. It is crushing the poorer of 
the nations; it is crippling the richest of them all. 

In order that you may understand exactly what I 
mean when I say that militarism is the “Burden of the 
Nations,” it is necessary that you go with me on such 
a journey around the world in fancy as I recently com¬ 
pleted in fact—a magic carpet journey, shall we say?— 
with eyes and ears open to facts as we shall find them. 
Indeed, I want you to listen with particular care as I 
pass to you the following facts—fascinating facts—facts 
which you do not possess now—which you cannot obtain 
unless you do go' with me and gather them as I have 
done. You may not agree with me in the conclusions 
to which they lead me, but I shall be satisfied if I can 
succeed in making you merely stop and think! 

We start with England—the mother country across 
the sea—England for short—though of course we mean 
the United Kingdom—Great Britain—the source and 
inspiration of our art and architecture, of our literature 
and our law—the very cradle of Occidental civilization. 


25 


Great Britain has forty-five million people crowded 
into an area mnch smaller than our single State of 
Texas. That crowded condition has given rise to some 
strange and remarkable economic facts. In the first 
place, Great Britain has a public debt of more than 
three and a half billion dollars—an average of $92 per 
capita for every man, woman, and child in the country. 
Last year, by census count, there were in England 
1,086,707 paupers. That is something you don’t know 
anything about in this country. Outside of the elee¬ 
mosynary institutions where we put those who by some 
limitation are unable to take care of themselves, we 
don’t have that type of population in America. 

Go on Monday to your public schools, and stand be¬ 
fore a class in the eighth grade, and begin to talk to 
them about paupers. They would open their eyes wide 
in ignorance, and wonder as to what you meant. A 
pauper is a man or woman who has nothing, who can 
get nothing, who depends for everything, every mouth¬ 
ful of food and strip of clothing, upon public or private 
charity. 

In England there are 1,086,707 absolute, registered 
paupers. Mr. Lloyd George has stated that under the 
old age pension bill it has been discovered that there are 
in Great Britain 12,000,000 people actually entitled,, 
under the terms of the act, to public charity, to enable 
them to end their lives decently, to die comfortably, and 
be buried respectably. Twelve million people so poor 
that they need public aid to get out of the world in a 
respectable fashion. And yet, with her army of 735,000 
men, with her navy of 633 war vessels of all sorts and 
kinds, Great Britain is spending this year thirty-five per 
cent of her entire income, above the interest on her stu¬ 
pendous debt, in creating and maintaining her naval 
and military armament. 

Take Germany: There are 65,000,000 people in Ger¬ 
many, so congested that they average three hundred and 
ten (310) to the square mile the Empire over. You can 
scarcely conceive of such congestion; and that, too, has 
created strange and unnatural economic problems. 

Germany has a debt of three and a half billion dollars,, 
gold, every cent of it war debt. Upon the backs of her 
people rests an enormous rate of taxation, a taxation 
that restricts her progress, for she spends over forty-five 
per cent of her entire income in order that she may 


26 


maintain her enormous army of 1,763,000 soldiers, and 
build and keep in working order a navy commensurate 
with that of her great arch enemy across the channel. 

The most absurd madness, the most pitiable thing in 
our modern world, is this weird, insane delusion—this 
hysterical madness—that exists between England and 
Germany. Here are two great nations—biood rela¬ 
tions—ethnic cousins, absolutely certain that one day 
they are going to go to war and fight each other—pro¬ 
vided always that they can find something to fight 
about. As it is, there is absolutely nothing that by any 
rational logic could possibly be magnified into a cause 
of combat. There isn’t a spot on earth where their in¬ 
terests clash; there isn’t a point in the universe where 
their lines of influence even cross. There is absolutely 
nothing between England and Germany but the Eng- 
glish channel, and yet so lurid, so fiendish, has become 
this madness that, regardless of their crowded millions 
of tax-laden people, it is going to take all the tact and 
diplomacy of statesmanship on both sides to prevent 
“the inevitable conflict.” And woe betide the world if 
that conflict comes. 

France, ever mindful of her pet provinces lost to 
Bismarck, still decorating with pathetic mourning the 
little kiosk in the Place de la Concorde that bears the 
name of Strasbourg; France, impoverished still by the 
millions of her men, strong in their manhood, who went 
to death following the Corsican—France carries a war 
debt of over six billion dollars, and spends thirty-seven 
per cent of her entire income in preparation for war. 

Merely to pay the interest on her stupendous debt 
costs every man, woman, and child in France $5.00 per 
annum. A war budget of nearly $300,000,000 per year 
for her army and navy adds $7.20 to the per capita bur¬ 
den. Aside from all the expense of government and 
administration, local and general, these two single items 
demand a yearly individual toll of $12.20! 

Russia—I don’t think I ever visited a country in all 
my travel up and down the length and breadth of the 
world with so much anticipation as I went to Russia. I 
never came away from any place in this world with so 
sad a heart. Russia is a wonderfully beautiful coun¬ 
try, attractive in its physical endowment. I think St. 
Petersburg and Moscow are two of the most beautiful 
cities I ever saw. Nowhere have I seen such evidence 
of lavish bestowals of wealth upon certain things. I 


27 


never have stepped inside the arched doorways of such 
churches—altars gleaming with gold, the holy icons 
framed in blazing diamonds and precious stones. They 
are paved with marble, wainscoted with malachite, pan¬ 
elled with lapis lazuli; and yet, step out of that envi¬ 
ronment of magnificence, and on the porches and on the 
steps of this majestic church you look upon the most 
awful squalor and pitiful poverty you ever saw. Old 
men and women lying there literally rotting, mumbling 
through toothless gums a prayer for a few pennies to 
keep them from starvation. I never saw such drunken¬ 
ness. The government makes and sells the whiskey, 
vodka, and the more vodka the peasants drink, the more 
profit in the pocket of the government. And what does 
the government care for the few thousand of these 
mujiks ? 

Russia covers one-seventh of the land surface of the 
globe. Out of her stupendous population of millions 
seventy-two per cent can neither read nor write, and in 
the sense that we know it, there is not a public school in 
the whole empire. Russia carries a crushing debt of 
four and three-quarter billion dollars. She borrows 
money every spring to pay the $2,000,000 interest on it; 
and yet she has provided this year four hundred and 
ninety-seven million dollars as a military budget, and at 
the knout’s end she is taking by increased taxation from 
her peasants and poor people the money with which to 
build and equip a navy to replace the one that Togo sent 
to the bottom of the Sea of Japan. 

Well, there is Japan! Poor little bankrupt Japan! 
The logical end of the whole grotesque delusion! Fifty 
millions of industrious, economical, patriotic people 
wresting a living from a soil impoverished by centuries, 
without national resource, figuring income and expense 
to the last penny, halving each pitiful coin in willingly 
borne taxation—eighty-five per cent of Japan’s income 
is derived from taxation—she has nothing else. It 
means that her people must give each year an average 
of twenty-five per cent of all they have and earn to pay 
Japan’s penalty for following her “Great Ally” in the 
race of mad militarism. 

Only fifteen per cent of the land of Japan is arable, 
and that only under forced intensive farming; all the 
rest of it is waste sand, rock, and lava, which would not 
grow even a blade of grass, and even the fifteen per cent 
of arable soil must be artificially fertilized before it will 
bring forth anything at all. 


28 


Japan has a national debt of $1,378,000*000, an aver¬ 
age of $21.75 for every man, woman, and child in the 
whole empire. If yon pnt Japan upon the auction- 
block tomorrow and sell her before the nations of the 
world, everything, from one end of the empire to the 
other—jewels of the emperor’s crown, her manufac¬ 
tories, railroads, tea fields, everything—I question 
whether at public sale the whole empire would bring 
enough to discharge the stupendous' crushing debt that 
she has laid upon her shoulders in an endeavor to keep 
up with her- great “Ally of the West.” 

I have been in Japan a great deal for the last ten 
3 ^ears. Some of my best, warmest, and most trusted 
friends are men who stand high in the councils of the 
empire and who are striving with all the intensity of 
their intense natures to solve their problems. I spent 
a very pleasant day not long ago. with Count Okuma, one 
of the few remaining old men of the ancient regime. 
Far from being the fire-breathing, sanguinary monster 
that a great deal of our sensational description pictures 
as describing the leading men of Japan, he is a delight¬ 
ful old man, spending the twilight of his life in good 
deeds. He has endowed a magnificent university, where 
some three thousand young men and women are engaged 
in the laudable pursuit of getting an education. He 
has one of the most magnificent collections of orchids in 
the world. He specializes in beautiful first editions and 
rare Confucian classics. He is a philosopher and a 
sage—an ideal old man. He said to me, as we were 
talking about these things: “The impression has gone 
out through the world that the Japanese are a sangui- 
narv nation—that we are bloodthirsty and quarrelsome, 
and that we delight in warfare. Have you ever stopped 
to think that Japan has fought just two wars in all her 
history, and that both those wars were in defense of 
what she considered—as you in America have considered 
when you fought—her sacred rights and her national 
honor. What Japan needs, and must have, is not war. 
Sbe has had enough of that, heaven knows. She needs 
fifty vears of quiet, constructive peace to win back the 
comfortable prosperity to which men may look as an 
ideal of national existence.” 

I am sure that Count Okuma simply voiced the senti¬ 
ment of multitudes of men whose names I might call, 
and with whom I have talked, in his expression of 
hearty gratitude to the United States. He said: “You 


29 


opened the door for ns by which we came out into the 
sisterhood of civilized nations. It was you who led the 
way. Shall a child make war upon its revered mother ?” 
And that is the sentiment you will find in Japan. 

Don’t believe, my friends, the things that come filter¬ 
ing through in the yellow dispatches from Tokio, de¬ 
signed merely to make reading matter for sensational 
scare lines. Yellow journalism depends upon springing 
sensations, even at the expense of kindling between na¬ 
tions the awful catastrophe of war. Japan is not going 
to fight you, not because she has only nineteen battle¬ 
ships, where you have thirty-eight. Japan is not going 
to fight you, because she does not want to fight anybody. 
She wants to be let alone. She wants peace—con¬ 
structive peace. She is not going to fight any one, be¬ 
cause she can’t. 

She went back from Portsmouth defeated in her de¬ 
mand for indemnity—not by the diplomacy and the 
strategy of Witte, but defeated by her own empty- 
handed poverty, for she knew, as the Russians knew, 
that Japan could not have delivered another battle to 
save her soul. There is only one way Japan could fight 
you, and that is that some European nation, intent 
upon her suicide, should underwrite the method of her 
self-murder, or that the Hebrew bankers of Europe 
should take a mortgage on her tea fields and lacquer fac¬ 
tories, feeling certain of its enforcement. 

Japan is not going to fight you as long as you and I 
are true to the principles upon which America stands. 
J apan will look to you as her inspiration and her friend. 

But there is not a nation of the world, from the least 
to the greatest, but has a hundred causes of paramount 
importance to the future of her people why these wasted 
millions might well be devoted to some other service. 
Yo matter what is left undone, the military mania is 
ever crying with feverish greed for more. 

Side by side with neglect of national duty and the 
•squandering of national resources, militarism is breed¬ 
ing internal dangers. The civilized world is seething 
with discontent. Everywhere the mass of the people 
are developing a resentful opposition to the existing 
order of things, and bv far the greater part of it comes 
from the crushing weight of taxation made necessary by 
the continually and constantly increasing demand for 
larger sums to devote to national defense. To the 
masses of men taxation is only justifiable when its re¬ 
sults are manifested in the general good. It is hard to 


30 


convince men of the necessity, in times of peace, of vast 
creations of armament, when, in order to pay for it, 
there must result ruinous taxes, long hours, short wages, 
high prices. The burden eventually becomes too heavy 
to be borne, and then comes chaos. 

In England today, with an annual income of one bil¬ 
lion dollars, eighty-six per cent comes from almost ruin¬ 
ous taxation. In Germany, in addition to the govern¬ 
ment ownership, the taxation burdens all classes of the 
people, and Germany has just assessed a special Income 
Tax of 8 per cent for military purposes. In France, the 
interest on the national debt alone is five dollars a head 
for every living soul in the Republic, and the war budget 
takes $7.20 more per capita. In Italy, taxes range from 
twelve per cent on houses to twenty per cent on income. 
In Japan, ninety per cent of the income is from taxa¬ 
tion—and Japanese patriotism rises to a willing rate 
of thirty-five per cent—but he pays it with a smile on 
his face and a song in his heart, and Banzai for the 
glory of Japan. 

Far beyond the decadent effect of actual war is the 
immoral effect of vast bodies of segregated men. Mur¬ 
der, cruelty, rapine, and loot always follow in the trail 
of battle, but they come quickly and they pass quickly: 
but far more lasting and degrading are the vices that 
hang about the idle thousands of armed peace. 

In Germany today fifty-seven per cent of the men are 
unmarried. There are three reasons for that peculiar 
condition of things: The first is that the average popu¬ 
lation is 310 to the square mile.' It takes a brave man, 
conscious of his power of parenthood, to complacently 
look into the face of the possibility of increasing that 
per cent of population. Then every man in Germany 
under the age of forty can be called on a few days’ no¬ 
tice to the colors. And when he is called he must go. 
He may dislike the order of things, he may dislike the 
War Lord, but when he is called he must go, put on his 
uniform, and stand up and make a target of himself to 
be shot at, whether he will or not; and no man wants a 
wife, with a cottage and a little brood of children, with 
a contingency like that before him. Then a great many 
of the men in Germany do not need to be married. Let 
me tell you just one single fact—a little bit of bar sin¬ 
ister, not worse in Germany, I take it, than in any other 
country, but I happen to have the statistics for this— 
last year ten per cent of all the children born in Ger- 


31 


man 3 r were fatherless, so far as recognized wedlock was 
concerned. There were born in Germany 172,814 ille¬ 
gitimate children—the very large majority, said the 
census report, in the neighborhood of cities housing 
large garrisons of troops. 

A friend of mine, who is a major surgeon in the Eng¬ 
lish army, walked with me through a great military 
hospital. There were twelve hundred men from garri¬ 
sons scattered all over Great Britain. My friend told 
me that out of the standing army of 725,000 men over 
100,000 were hopelessly, helplessly, incurably invalided 
as the result of vices that hang around the camp, that 
inhere in the profession of the soldinr. 

In the United States army at least l',200 men—more 
than an entire war-footing regiment—are constantly 
under medical treatment for venereal disease. These 
results of vice overbalance all other causes of disability. 
Typhoid, malaria, smallpox, all these are negligible be¬ 
side the black plague. In 1902, out of every 1,000 men 
162 were diseased. In 1912, with all recent discoveries 
as to prevention and cure, there were 11,211 cases of 
venereal disease, as against 3,737 of all others. That 
is the army. In the navy the rate is 160. Surgeon- 
General Rixey, in his 1909 report, said: “This class 
(venereal) of disease renders entirely ineffective for 
over a month three battleships, with a complement of 
1,000 officers and men for each.” And yet what can 
you expect ? 

Don’t you see that if you teach a man that one com¬ 
mandment is wrong, you can’t for the life of you defend 
the other nine? Don’t you see that if it is right to 
commit murder : you have no logic by which you can 
teach him that it is wrong to commit adultery ? Don’t 
you see that the whole moral fabric stands or falls by 
the same logic? 

The underlying genius of warfare is strategy, and in 
thp conception of strategy the end always justifies the 
means. Deceit, fraud, untruthfulness, spite, betrayal— 
these are the methods of military statesmanship. Em¬ 
body them in modern civilization, and you have found 
war’s philosophy. 

Aside from japan, an anomaly among the sister na¬ 
tions, the greatest powers of the world are all the repre¬ 
sentative embodiment of Christian civilization. Cut 
out all reference to the spiritual side of religion, all ref¬ 
erence to salvation, or heaven, or hell, or immortality; 


32 


make Christianity merely the dynamic of a desirable 
type of civilization. Reduce the much-disputed question 
of foreign missions to a mere desire to carry culture 
about the world. 

What sort of a front does the Christian civilization of 
the world present as it prays its prayers and sings its 
psalms under the shadow of naked steel, while the “per¬ 
ishing heathen” laugh in ill-concealed contempt and 
cry, “Look how these Christians love!” 

I think the saddest thing I saw in my whole journey 
around the world was a cartoon in a Mohammedan paper 
published in Cairo. I happened to be in that part of the 
world when Italy declared war against Turkey to take 
Tripoli. The most inexcusable act that has happened 
in modern civilization was the declaration of war against. 
Turkey 'for a little strip of arid land in Tripoli. Italy 
had no reason to fight, unless it was that she said: 
“We have a big army. We have trained them to kill. 
Unless we give them something to kill, they might get 
to killing each other or us. We have got to have some¬ 
thing to keep our battleships from rusting away at the 
docks. All the nations have taken a bit of Africa. 
England took a grab, France took a piece, Germany 
reached over and took a little; if we are going to train 
in big company we must have a piece of Africa.” So 
Italy declared war. I happened to be in Italy when 
the legions marched away from their homes in Florence, 
in Rome, in Naples. These regiments of boys came 
down the streets and took ships that took them to 
xAfrica; they knew not what for; they cared less. I never 
saw a particle of enthusiasm in those regiments. They 
looked to me very much like our regiments of national 
guards—boys mostly; broad shoulders, brown cheeks, 
healthy looking; no bands playing; the merchants did 
not leave their stores; the populace did not gather in 
cheering crowds. I saw no enthusiasm of any kind. 
They took ship and went to fight for a piece of Tripoli. 

A few weeks after that I was in Cai^o. A battle had 
been fought. I saw a cartoon I shall never forget. The 
Moslem artist had drawn a remarkable picture. It was 
the desert of Tripoli, in the immediate foreground a 
single towering palm tree. Under it an old man was 
standing—an old desert sheik, his tattered burnous 
scarcely reaching to his poor ankles, his green turban on 
his head, and the wind, blowing his gray locks about his 
face. Beside him was a little weazened old woman. 


33 


crouching at his side, as he flung around her a protect¬ 
ing arm. Just over here was a younger woman with a 
babe suckling at her naked breast, another little child 
pulling her skirts. All of them seemed to be shrinking 
from some approaching terror. Away yonder on the line 
of the horizon some one had fired a shell that had de¬ 
scribed its fiery arch in the sky. It had suddenly burst 
above them, where it looked like some great meteor fall¬ 
ing from the sky, and underneath it the Moha. nim p.da.Ti 
cartoonist, had written, “Is this, then, perhaps, the Star 
of Bethlehem?” 

Oh, the awful cynicism of it, when we remember that 
the nation that fired the shot that killed helpless old 
women and drabbled little children in their own blood 
was the nation in whose capital city sits the head of the 
greatest religious organization in the world, “The Vice¬ 
gerent of God, to rule in His name.” How can Chris¬ 
tianity but stand abashed in the presence of this mili¬ 
tarism that gives the lie to its Prince of Peace ? 

So civilization today faces its most tremendous prob¬ 
lem. Morals, education, progress, and religion are bound 
up in one. Militarism squanders resources, increases 
taxation, raises the cost of living, breeds rebellion and 
anarchy, lowers moral ideals, spreads leprous vice, makes 
of religion a thing of grotesque hypocrisy, paralyzes mis¬ 
sions, throttles the world. Eeason cries “Halt!” Bpt 
fear has reason chained. Hot a nation of them all but 
would stop today if it could; but self-preservation is the 
first law of life. In the aggregation of ancient states 
heredity is stronger than sagacity. The world is tricked 
by a delusion. 

Armed peace is not peace, but potential, menacing 
war. There is only one way to insure peace, and that is 
to abandon the possibility of war. The world wants 
peace. It wants a constructive age that will prove the 
ideals of humanity and make our dreams come true. 
Who will lead the way? It will require courage, and 
self-sacrifice far beyond the heroism of battle. Who is 
to lead the way? America can do it. 

Is she brave enough? Can she do it still? Has she 
gone too far, or can she still be what our fathers dreamed 
when they planted that flag, a new constellation in the 
firmament of the earth ? We have made some sad mis¬ 
takes. The contagion, with its glamour and its barbaric 
fascination, has touched our sober judgment. We who 
are supreme in our self-sufficiency—who for a century 


34 


laughed at the follies of the Old World madness—have 
allowed ourselves a venture in the domain of Bedlam. 
Providence fluug us for a moment into the forefront of 
the world, and instead of remembering that we stood for 
a new age and a new philosophy we dressed ourselves 
in the uniform of modern savagery and began to ape the 
insanity of the older world. We are not by instinct a 
military nation. It does not set well with the genius 
• of the Republic. It does not attract our men. Our 
young men are men of vision, of accomplishment; men 
of peaceful conditions. They dream dreams. There is 
nothing attractive to the young men of America in being 
shut up in dusty barracks and burning up in practice 
marches. If they must march, they want to march for 
something and to some place. Our old men are not 
taken with the posturing of pomposity and the glare 
and glamours of European militarism. 

Our American women don’t go down into the dark 
valley and the shadow of death to breed boys to be made 
targets for bullets unless there is something behind the 
bullets that is worth sacrifice. What we have done, we 
have done well. Let us congratulate ourselves on that. 
With our tremendous resources, what we have made is 
the best that can be made. 

At Spithead, at the King’s Coronation, peace advo¬ 
cate as I am, I hugged myself when I looked upon the 
lordly Delaware, supremest of them all, and proof to the 
world of what money and Yankee genius can do when it 
sets out to do it. But we don’t want Delawares; we 
don’t want standing armies and big navies. We have no 
hereditary enemies. We have no old feuds to fight over. 
Our militarism is artificial, but its tremendous cost is a 
proof of how easily we might come to the brink of ruin. 

We have only succeeded in collecting an army of 
91,785 men and a navy of 47,500—less than 150,000 
men in all—even after offering chromos of their enlist¬ 
ment. 

We have a population of 100,000,000 on a self-suffi¬ 
cient area of 3,571,223 square miles. What a wonderful 
thing it is to stand across the seas and look at America! 
You think about America sometimes, but did you ever 
look at it at the angle of five thousand miles and see 
what it looks like? Did you know that you can take 
England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, France, Spain, Por¬ 
tugal, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, 
Sweden, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Greece, Turkey— 



35 


that is, all of ^Europe.except Russia? Now take a map 
of the United States; cnt otf New England and 
straighten the eastern line; split the map down the sum¬ 
mit of the Rocky Mountains from Canada to Mexico. 
You have a square republic now, bounded on the north 
by Canada and the Great Lakes, on the east by the Hud¬ 
son River and the Atlantic, south by Mexico and the 
Gulf, west by the Rocky Mountains. Now, between the 
Hudson River and the Rockies—between Albany, N. Y., 
and Denver, Colorado—you can take all Europe except 
Russia, and lay it down once, twice and a half a time— 
two and a half times—and still have one-sixth of our 
territory left to make a frame to go around the marvel¬ 
ous picture and hang it on the Pole Star for all the world 
to view in wonder and amaze. Here are 1,800,000 square 
miles of arable soil, capable of supporting, not our pres¬ 
ent 100,000,000, but capable of supporting a thousand 
million population better than any equal area on the face 
of the earth. 

We have a national debt of a round billion dollars, 
every penny of it war debt, too. During the past thirty 
years our population has increased eighty-five per cent, 
our wealth one hundred and eighty-five per cent, and 
our expenditures four hundred per cent. For the ten 
years before the Spanish war we appropriated yearly 
$24,000,000 for our army and $27,000,000 for our navy. 
Since the Spanish war each year $83,000,000 at least 
has gone to. the War Department, an average of $108,- 
000,000 to the navy. In the ten years we have , spent 
$1,975,000,000, enough to have paid the entire national 
debt and have built three Panama Canals. 

During 1912 our entire income was $702,000,000. 
Of this we expended $654,000,000, and of that expendi¬ 
ture $444,000,000 went to the War, Navy, and Pension 
departments. Seventy-two per cent, that is, of the en¬ 
tire income—for war* past, present, and to come, and 
twenty-eight per cent, or what was left, for all that a 
great nation should do—deserts to be irrigated, swamps, 
to be drained, rivers to be deepened, harbors to be 
dredged, forests to be guarded, roads to be built, tuber¬ 
culosis to be fought, cancer to be investigated, ten mil¬ 
lion negroes to be cared for—all, all the mighty prob¬ 
lems of a free Republic to be met, and we kept twenty- 
eight per cent of our income and gave the rest to a 
cheap imitation of European insanity. 

The whole public school system of America cost in 
1912 the sum of $426,250,434, and we lavished $444,- 


36 


000,000 on our pet delusion. A single battleship costs 
at least $15,000,000; its upkeep at least $750,000 per 
year. We have grown, alas! so accustomed to battle¬ 
ships and their cost that the enormous magnitude fails 
to impress us as it should. 

The cost of one battleship would furnish a faculty of 
twenty-five professors to fifty colleges for five years. It 
would furnish the entire public-school system to ten 
cities of 50,000 inhabitants for ten years. It would 
give a complete college or technical education to 20,000 
young men. It would build modern sanitary tenements, 
whose small rental would keep them in lasting repair 
and condition, capable of housing 300,000 souls in com¬ 
fort and safety. It would build and endow fifteen manual 
training schools and enable them to send out each year 
ten thousand boys and young men fit to earn not a mere 
competence, but an adequate living. Instead of costing 
three-quarters of a million dollars to keep it in repair, 
and in ten years at most going to the scrap-heap of 
uselessness, that one battleship would eliminate igno¬ 
rance and crime and pave the way to usefulness and suc¬ 
cess for thousands of men for generations to come. 
And we are urged to perpetuate this monumental ex¬ 
travagance yearly—-not by building one ship alone, but 
two or three, and even four—so wild has become the 
mania of the extreme advocates of militarism. 

We have fifty-two fourteen-inch guns in our navy, 
each throwing a 1,400-pound shell, firing three shells a 
minute. These monsters of destruction can reach a tar¬ 
get fourteen miles away. We have thirty-six thirteen- 
inch cannon all but as powerful. 

These guns cost $75,000 apiece. Every time a gun is 
fired it burns $1,000 to ashes, and all this while people 
starve in our slums, children die like flies for lack of 
pure milk, and half-famished girls sell their virtue for 
the price of life. And we pay $75,000 for one gun! 
Why, my God! a nation that will do a thing like that 
deserves the doom that fell on Babylon and that swept 
Borne from the hills she thought were eternal. 

And all this without an enemy in the world—without 
a single power to challenge us to combat. 

Let America stop. We have nothing to lose. We have 
an imperishable immortality to gain. More, we can 
teach our own people a higher, loftier purpose of life 
than the sordid greed for territory and power that domi¬ 
nates the policy of the world. We can pour out our mil- 


37 


lions for the people’s good. We can fight poverty and 
want. We can campaign against vice and unrighteous¬ 
ness. We can make our armies conquering battalions 
who shall.bear the triumphant banners of accomplish¬ 
ment. We can bridge our rivers, scale our mountains, 
make ample our harbors, bring the crystal magic of our 
streams, beneath whose touch our arid deserts shall bud 
and blossom into-gardens of beauty and fertility. We 
can harness our waterfalls until the whir of masterful 
machinery shall make a symphony keyed to the music of 
peace. 

Never came an army home from a hard-fought cam¬ 
paign crowned with such glory as belonged to the mud- 
daubed, water-stained regiments of our national guard 
who a few months ago fought the floods and gave battle 
to the swollen rivers. Their hands were blistered from 
the shovel handles and their shoulders were aching from 
the burden of bags of sand; but they left behind them, 
not hospitals stinking of putrid blood or sodden fields 
laid out in windrows of mangled, ghastly dead. They 
left behind them mothers clasping to thankful hearts 
the children rescued from the torrent, and happy towns, 
rejoicing even in the face of grim destruction over the 
valor of the nation’s men who had fought for a nation’s 
weal. 

We have nothing to lose save the sorry, sordid boast 
of cruelty and power. We can gain the realization of a 
true democracy—-a nation battling for the Common 
Good. 

Let America stop! 

Let America stand before the nations clad in simple 
honesty, panoplied in elemental justice. Let her appeal 
to the common conscience of the world. Let her say to 
the war-mad, demented powers of Europe: “There is a 
way out, and we will lead. We will help you police the 
sea; we will give our quota to a constabulary of peace; 
but we are through. No great standing army, no more 
leviathan battleships. We trust to what we boast of as 
the highest attainment of the age—the innate justice of 
civilized humanity. 

“Touch us if you dare! Violate at your peril the 
sacred asgis with which we panoply the world’s peace! 

“We shall have our problems, but for their solution 
you will go with us to The Hague; you will stand beside 
us at the bar of international arbitration; plead your 
cause with all the eloquence you can command. Then 


38 


we will plead ours. Then the Court shall decide. But 
when the verdict is given you will abide by the decision 
of that court, or w T e shall hold you up to the scorn and 
contempt of the enlightened conscience of the. world.” 

Within thirty days of such a pronouncement the na¬ 
tions of the earth will stand behind America, thanking 
Cod for the moral courage of a people who had dared 
not to fight for peace, but to live to make peace. 

It is Americans supreme opportunity. It will demand 
of us clean hands and a pure heart. They must be with¬ 
out reproach who bear the banner of righteousness. 

Heaven grant us the courage to be what our fathers 
dreamed. And so when the day shall come, as it must 
come, when in company with earth’s mighty past this 
great Republic shall lie down at last, its duty done, its 
responsibility ended, may they write above her resting- 
place, not “This was the richest nation in the world,” 
not “This was the greatest nation in the world”—but 
above her may they write in letters of light, that all 
the ages to come may read and glorify, the proudest 
epitaph a nation may win, “This was America, the Peace¬ 
maker of the World.” 


THE STRENGTH OF THE NATIONS- 


39 



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THE DEBT OF THE NATIONS. 


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